Chinese and Non-Chinese English Teachers’ Reactions to Chinese English in Academic Writing

Abstract

There has been a relative lack of research on China English (CE) in academic writing. This study fills that gap by examining Chinese (n = 30) and non-Chinese (n = 16) English language teachers’ reactions to features of China English in texts written by Chinese university students. Participants were given an acceptability judgment task of seven argumentative essays and asked to identify any instance of unacceptable language usage, limited to the ten usages they deemed the most unacceptable. In follow-up interviews, volunteer participants were asked to explain their reasons for rejecting the usages and discuss their opinions about language use in academic writing in general. These results were then compared with the features of CE which have been claimed in the literature on the subject in order to determine how participants reacted to features of CE in academic writing. The study found that most loan words and loan translations were not widely rejected, but that some participants saw them as markedly Chinese. It also found that some non-Chinese participants rejected a possible semantic shift in the meaning of the word ‘outside,’ while Chinese participants appeared to accept it. Possible instances of adjacent default tense and null subject were widely rejected by participants. Overall, the study appears to have been a useful method for investigating reactions to ‘real-world’ use of CE, studies about which have been lacking.